This week I’ve been helped by this quotation from the eighth book of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations:
Never confuse yourself by visions of an entire lifetime at once. That is, do not let your thoughts range over the whole multitude and variety of the misfortunes that may befall you, but rather, as you encounter each one, ask yourself, ‘What is there unendurable, so insupportable, in this?’ You will find that you are ashamed to admit defeat. Again, remember that it is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened of you confine it strictly to its own limits, and are severe enough with your mind’s ability to bear such a trifle.
I’m probably being a little over-dramatic, as this week’s setbacks haven’t been so serious, when looking at the bigger picture. So we’re going to have to wait until 2022 to move house? Oh well.
Next week, it’s half-term for our kids, so I’m taking Monday and Friday off. That, of course, means that Tuesday through Thursday is wall-to-wall meetings and workshops. I can’t wait to travel again.
Header gif created from short video I took this week near our house in Morpeth, Northumberland
In October 2017, during the Catalonian independence referendum, I travelled to Barcelona to talk about decentralised technologies. It was perfect timing. Not only was I talking about technologies such as IPFS and ZeroNet, but they were being used to circumvent government blocks on sites listing places where people could vote.
As we saw with Parler and Amazon Web Services, the technology stack underneath apps can be used to take them down. That’s good if we’re talking about places for the alt-right and fascists to organise. But it’s not so good if the technology is used against us and the things we think are important.
That’s why I think there are two pinch points that have been coming into focus over the last decade:
DNS
File storage
The first of these is out of scope for this post but I continue to keep my eye on progress being made through, for example, the Brave browser having native support for Tor websites, and perhaps projects such as Namecoin becoming more mainstream.
It’s the second I want to discuss, because while control of DNS is largely in the control of governments, control of file storage (‘the cloud’) is largely in the hand of Big Tech. For example, I host many of my websites through Digital Ocean, but they, in turn, get their storage capacity through services provided by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
There are three particular technologies that I’ve had my eye on, ever since doing the initial research for MoodleNet back in early 2018:
Filecoin — “a decentralized storage network designed to store humanity’s most valuable information”
Sia — “decentralized storage for the post-cloud world”
The reason I’m writing about them now, is that all three are cryptocurrencies I’ve invested a small amount of money in recently. Interestingly, they’re all taking slightly different approaches to the question of decentralised file storage, with each having useful pages explaining how they work (Filecoin, Sia, Storj).
One thing they have in common is that, a bit like people renting out their unused rooms via Airbnb, the idea is to take the world’s unused storage space, and make it available in a decentralised, trustless way.
The obvious next question to be asked, I guess, is to do with liability: if someone is trying to store something illegal and it happens to be stored on a device I own? Will I get prosecuted?
In the European union; hosts may be protected by Directive 2000/31/EC as long as they meet certain criteria.
I’ve used Bittorrent since I first found out about it, and in 2005 talked about it potentially revolutionising the way educators share resources. A few years later I was using Grouper to share gigabytes worth of resources with other teachers, before it was acquired by Sony. By 2013, I was experimenting with Bittorrent Sync, and even last year I was demonstrating how to seed torrents via the Internet Archive.
The reason I mention this is that I’ve been a fan of decentralised ways of sharing files for over 15 years now, and feel that we’ve really got to get away from the centralisation of the internet that’s been going on over the last decade. While we can’t wind the clock back, we can design easy-to-use services that make the default be decentralisation rather than centralisation.
So, yes, I’m putting my money where my mouth is with decentralised storage tech. I’m not sure which will end up being the most used, but I like the fact that, with Tardigrade, Storj has created a drop-in replacement for Amazon services which is not only cheaper, but decentralised and encrypted by default.
After around 10 days of migraine-like headaches and fuzziness, they ended towards on Thursday evening. I’m sure some of it is due to the weather, which has been abysmal (it’s still raining as I write this) but also due to the amount of time I’m spending on screens.
We’ve just finished Week 4 of the Catalyst-funded sector challenge project that I’m project managing. As I mentioned last week, the project is successful if we manage to identify and prototype ways to remove barriers for the 25% of people who are eligible for Universal Credit, but who, for various reasons, don’t claim it.
In addition to the Catalyst project I’m project managing, I’m part of the We Are Open Co-op team that is helping 11 charities better-define what they need to do to create a product or service for their users. Laura Hilliger is project managing and is doing a great job in getting everything organised.
It’s Week 1 for that project next week, so from mid-February until the end of March, I’ll be working almost entirely on Catalyst-funded stuff.
In preparation for that, I’ve been tying up most of my work with Outlandish this week. I led a retro on the productisation work I did with them primarily from September to December last year, and am stepping back from the week-to-week work around Building OUT. I will, however, still be part of their monthly strategy sessions around the latter.
Next week, then, is the badges workshop, Catalyst projects, and a co-op half-day. Laura and I will also hopefully finish recording the first episode of the podcast we’re working on.
Photo of the stepping stones in Morpeth, England, where I live. The amount of rain this week has meant that the River Wansbeck is close to flooding.
